Cotton or other fibrous material, such as synthetic staple fibers, conventionally arrive at the processing plant in the form of a bale. Each bale comprises a mass of fibers compressed under considerable pressure into an elongated cube of predetermined approximate dimensions weighing from 400 to 650 pounds and having a surrounding wrapping of a covering material, normally burlap sacking or polyethylene with the fibers being held in a highly compressed condition and the burlap being held about the fibers by a plurality of flexible steel retaining bands.
Historically, removal of the wrapping and restraining bands in order to permit processing of the fibers has been essentially a hand operation involving tipping of the bale from its usual vertical storage position onto its side, cutting the steel bands on the bale, removing the upper half of burlap wrapping from the bale then manually rolling the bale over to remove the wrapping from the other half of the bale. Removal of the wrapping by this manual procedure is obviously a most strenuous task in view of the weight of the bales. Furthermore, the operation is hazardous because the steel restraining bands are placed under great pressure to retain the fibrous mass comprising the bale in a highly compressed state, and the steel bands spring outwardly with great force when clipped. After a bale is opened by clipping the steel bands the fibrous mass expands or "blossoms" with the release of pressure with the consequence that the bale is difficult to move as a unit. Therefore, according to the prior art, the opening of the bales as just described occurs in the opening room as near as practicable to the fiber feeding machines or the first in a series of machines which successively process the fibers into yarn. It is conventional practice to then manually carry an armful of fibers from each of a plurality of opened bales to the hoppers of the fiber processing machines. Because of the difficulty in manually opening the bales and the necessity of physically moving them during the opening process, it is nearly impossible to position the bales at predetermined positions with the precision required when using automated material handling equipment to carry fibers from the opened bales to the hoppers such as disclosed, for example, in U.S. application Ser. No. 275,942 filed in the U.S. Pat. Office July 28, 1972, by Alex J. Keller, now U.S. Pat. No. 3,777,908.